Introduction: The maintenance manager's dilemma

The week begins, as it often does, with a decision rooted in routine. A maintenance manager, let’s call him David, sits at his desk reviewing the upcoming work schedule. On the calendar, a recurring task: the monthly inspection of the cathodic protection (CP) system for a remote section of steel pipeline. The task is not prompted by an alarm or a performance issue but simply by the passage of time.

David dispatches a two-person crew. The journey is a 200-kilometer round trip, consuming half a day in travel alone, not to mention the hours of two of his experienced technicians and the cost of fuel. Upon arrival, they take their measurements, verify the rectifier, check the boxes, and deliver the verdict: the assets are, in fact, still functioning and perfectly healthy.

Routine, manual checks are common at grid operators’. But in the meantime, they are facing increasing pressure from several fronts: operational costs are rising, compliance rules are getting stricter, and the shortage of skilled workers makes expert time more valuable than ever.

In this environment, time-based maintenance (TBM) creates a state of reactive “firefighting,” where teams are either performing unnecessary work, either responding to catastrophic failures that could have been prevented:

• At one end is Preventive Maintenance, an aged-based strategy that triggers action based on time, which is often too early, leading to the kind of wasted visit that David’s team just performed.
• At the other end is Reactive Maintenance, where action is only taken after a failure, which is always too late.

But what if the assets could communicate their condition in real-time? What if, instead of relying on a static schedule, David could listen directly to the needs of his infrastructure?

That’s what infrastructure monitoring is about: providing the necessary data and alerts to enable a shift towards condition-based monitoring. In this article, we will discuss how grid operators can move away from the rigid constraints of the calendar and toward a more safe, efficient, and cost-effective model of field operations.

Part 1: The hidden costs of time-based maintenance

The adherence to a fixed maintenance schedule can feel like a responsible, structured approach to asset management. It provides a clear plan and a sense of control. However, beneath this surface lies hidden costs — both direct financial drains and severe, unmanaged risks that accumulate between scheduled visits.

The drain on resources: wasted visits and misallocated expertise

The most visible cost of TBM is the direct impact on operational expenditure (OPEX). Every time a field crew is dispatched for a routine inspection of a healthy asset, the organization incurs tangible costs for fuel, vehicle wear and tear, and man-hours.

Additionally, the technician who spends a day driving to and from a remote site to perform a routine check is a trained specialist being used as a simple data collector. This represents a massive opportunity cost; that same person could have spent the day analyzing complex data, working on critical repair, or mentoring a junior team member. Instead, their skills are squandered on a task that provides no new information.

The risk of blind-spot: what happens between inspections

The second cost of TBM is the risk created by the long periods of blindness between inspections. A check on Tuesday provides no guarantee of an asset’s health on Wednesday. This approach is founded on the flawed assumption that asset degradation is a slow, linear, and predictable process that aligns with a calendar cycle. In reality, many failures develop non-linearly, triggered by specific events or environmental conditions.

Overall, reactive maintenance costs can be 25% to 30% higherSource: Chapter 5: Types of maintenance programs. (Federal Energy Management Program). In Operations & Maintenance Best Practices Guide: Release 3.0. than those of a predictive, condition-based approach. For large, distributed networks with thousands of assets, these individual costs multiply into a significant financial burden over a year.

Part 2: How real-time data transforms your work planning

Moving away from the calendar requires a new source of truth. Real-time data, collected continuously from sensors on your assets, provides this foundation and creates new capabilities, empowering your teams to work more effectively and strategically.

Achieving clarity: from a static schedule to a live asset map

For many technicians and managers, the primary view of their network is a static one: a complex spreadsheet or a GIS system that shows where assets are, but not how they are.

Real-time monitoring changes this. The static map becomes a dynamic, live dashboard of your entire network’s health.

The Asset Monitoring Platform (AMP), for example, uses a map-centric interface where every asset is represented by an icon that changes color based on its current condition: green for normal, orange for a serious issue, and red for a critical one. Additionally, when anomalies are detected, alarm notifications are sent.

With a single glance, a manager can get a comprehensive overview of their entire operational territory and can see exactly where problems are emerging, in real time. The question is no longer “What might be wrong out there?” but “Where do I need to focus my attention right now?”. You can finally manage the asset, not just the schedule.

The end of the unnecessary truck roll: the tale of the Gasunie gas grid

GasunieTo read the complete Gasunie case study, check out: How Gasunie automated cathodic protection monitoring for 11,000 assets with the Asset Monitoring Platform. manages 12,000 km of pipelines beneath the Netherlands, a vast network requiring constant monitoring of its cathodic protection (CP) systems.

Historically, this meant dispatching contractors across the country for manual checks — a costly, labor-intensive process that left long periods of informational blindness between visits.

In 2023, Gasunie launched a major digitization project, equipping 11,000 of its 18,000 CP poles with Withthegrid’s IoT sensors.

The data is sent directly to the Asset Monitoring Platform (AMP), eliminating the need for routine manual measurements and providing continuous visibility into the CP system’s performance. The project has transformed their maintenance from reactive to proactive.

Part 3: A simple framework for prioritizing maintenance tasks based on asset data

The transition to a condition-based model brings incredible clarity, but it can also present a new challenge: what to do when you have multiple alerts? On a difficult day, a manager might be faced with dozens of issues across their network. The key is to move from simply receiving data to acting on it intelligently. This requires a clear, simple framework for turning data into a prioritized action plan.

Step 1: Establishing your early-warning system

The first step is to ensure that you are only alerted to meaningful events. A constant stream of raw data is useless without context. The goal is to turn that data into a clear signal that requires attention. This is achieved by configuring issue triggers within a monitoring platform.

In the AMP, this process is designed to be both powerful and intuitive. Users can set thresholds for any measurement, defining what constitutes a normal, serious, or critical state. These are represented by colors (blue for an informational notice, orange for a serious issue, and red for a critical one), giving operators immediate visual context for an alert’s urgency.

However, a common fear when implementing any automated alerting system is “alert fatigue” – being overwhelmed by so many notifications that they all become noise. To prevent this, it is crucial to filter out transient spikes and false positives. Advanced features like the “Issue Delay” in the AMP are designed for this purpose. Instead of triggering an issue on a single anomalous reading, a user can create a more intelligent rule, such as: “Only create a ‘Serious’ issue if three consecutive measurements are above the threshold within a two-hour period”. This simple logic ensures that when an alert does come through, it represents a persistent, genuine deviation that warrants investigation, not just a momentary fluctuation. This is how you build an early-warning system that your team can trust.

Step 2: Turning a signal into a directive

An alert from your early-warning system is a notification. An “Issue” within the AMP is a directive — an actionable work item that can be managed, tracked, and resolved. This is the step where a data point becomes part of an operational workflow.

Once an issue is automatically generated by a trigger, the AMP user can immediately:

• Add comments: Provide context, ask questions, or record initial observations directly within the issue.
• Assign the issue: Delegate the task to a specific user or team, ensuring clear ownership and accountability.
• Attach files: Add photos from the field, technical diagrams, or historical reports to give the assigned team all the information they need in one place.
• Apply labels: Use custom labels like “Awaiting parts” or “Scheduled for next week” to categorize and track the status of all open issues at a glance.

This structured workflow transforms asset management from a series of disconnected emails and phone calls into a fully auditable, transparent process. It fosters cross-team alignment, allowing asset management, field operations, and compliance teams to work from a single source of truth.

Step 3: A framework for prioritization

With a reliable stream of issues, the final challenge is deciding what to tackle first. The platform can tell you the “what,” but the expert provides the “so what.”

A simple yet powerful framework for this is to evaluate every issue along two axes: Severity and Consequence.

• Severity: How bad is the deviation?
  This is a measure of the anomaly itself. Is a pressure reading 1% over the limit or 50% over? The AMP can help quantify this by calculating a severity_percentage that shows exactly how far a measurement has deviated from its defined threshold, providing an objective measure of the problem’s magnitude.
• Consequence: How much does it matter?
  This is where human expertise is indispensable. A severe issue on a non-critical, redundant asset may be less important than a minor issue on a primary transmission line that serves thousands of customers.

By combining these two factors, you can place every issue into a simple prioritization matrix, which provides a clear directive for action.

Table 3.1: The Maintenance Prioritization Matrix

This framework formalizes the partnership between the platform and the professional. It ensures that technology is not a replacement for expertise, but a powerful amplifier of it, guiding your team to apply their limited resources with maximum impact.

The Asset Monitoring Platform: the tool for the job

A successful shift to condition-based maintenance depends on having the right tool. The Asset Monitoring Platform (AMP) is an end-to-end solution designed for the specific challenges of critical infrastructure.
The AMP is composed of two distinct environments that work together:

1. A connectivity environment: This is the foundation where you connect and manage your entire fleet of IoT devices, whether they are from Withthegrid or a third party. Here, you can configure data streams, manage firmware, and securely assign devices to different monitoring projects. It gives you full control over the data pipeline.
2. A monitoring environment: This is where data becomes intelligence. Users get a complete overview of their assets on a map, track issues, analyze trends through graphs and custom dashboards, and manage field operations.

The platform is designed to be flexible and scalable. Whether you need a fully managed solution with our pre-configured sensors for use cases like cathodic protection or leak detection, or you just need the software to integrate your own devices, the AMP adapts to your needs. It integrates with your existing GIS systems and allows you to forward data to your own IT systems via API or webhooks, ensuring it fits into your existing digital ecosystem

Conclusion: from firefighting to foresight

Let’s return to David, our maintenance manager. His week no longer begins with a blind dispatch dictated by the calendar. It begins with a clear, data-driven overview of his entire network. He is no longer sending his people on long drives to inspect healthy assets. Instead, he is deploying them with purpose and precision to address issues that have been identified and analyzed through the Asset Monitoring Platform before a truck ever leaves the depot. He has shifted from reacting to problems to taking proactive control.

By enabling smarter grids, asset and maintenance managers like David are not only improving efficiency, but also safeguarding the reliability and safety of the infrastructure we all depend on.